You can read all of Emily Dickinson
And never know that the Civil War happened
Walt Whitman reported from the thick of it
Tending to the dying and the industrially maimed

The great crisis inspired Melville to the worst poetry
Up they climbed without rail or banister
Spite of grapeshot [something] and canister
Rhymed couplets not his forte

So here comes the almighty I
The great DK Lord of Erudition
Dickinson great poems
Whitman great

Welcome aboard Herman
Up let us climb together
I won’t even attempt a rhyme
Or rely upon any other fucking banister

We have naught for death but toys

He could now be taken seriously
For he had forsworn Lite beer and candy bars
He could devote his formidable erudition
To the expression of his unique
If unprepossessing self

From a distance in the fog
The illuminated sign atop the bridge
Seemed a beacon of triumph
Or a vigil for Santa Lúcia
Whereas in fact it merely enjoined
A speed not to exceed 25 MPH

And in dreams the mighty bridge
Seemed to rise and never crest
And who should attempt its crossing on foot
Would know the meaning of acrophobia
One must never take such steps lightly

And how do we decide and when
That some course of action threatens
So much peril as to preclude its undertaking

A question not to be asked
As if a private problem were a universal law
As if anyone were capable
Of such questions in dreams
As if a gorgoneion were unavailable
For a sum of money

For in dreams we find ourselves
Upon the throne of the blessed sun himself
The planets processing in stately polonaise
Stepping and bowing and displaying their regalia
Like the obedient courtiers they are

Renounce renounce
Fear and lust
Take labor and hardship for your lot
It’s not a foul rag and bone shop
It’s a customer service desk
Efficient and clean
Behind which I have secretly
Composed this document

Regarding oneself as a product of the times
Is a hardy perennial
A transhistorical fact
An ineluctable modality

Condemned to vulgarity
Barely capable of commencing
Much less completing
The introversion of the quest

Failing to resolve the dire antinomies
As of subject and object
Mind and nature
Self and soul

Failing to adopt
And indeed actively renouncing
The humanist lexicon
The centrality of free thought

Options abound
One could hire an automatic writer
School at sex drugs or mysicism
Scrape away at the neocortex

Or stage dive
Into the uniform crowd
The random enthusiasts
Influence influence influence

Meditate upon pop stars and restaurants
Postures and proposals
Cliches and bon mots
And the fall from a terrifyingly great height

To complain
Of sad disorder
A naive fantasy
Of primal order

I have a hard time saying my own name
I have a hard time making this work
This is not funny
This is far from serious
A line of cars was end-stopped
And therefore not enjambed

The fruit of experience and not the fruit
Of experience
Lungs and suffers
The rapes of graft
The found and the çurly
The voice flat and unimpassioned
Like that of one who knows something
Good morning Dr. Spooner

Surly some revelation is at hand
Close at hand or father away
What are the fingers called
The little one near the tip of the nose
The ring finger near the bridge
The thumb between the cheekbone and the ear
The other two on the brow
And the rest

Aleatory nuances
Otherwise pretensions
Presumptions
Pomposities
Affectations
And other exaltations

Press the claws into the flesh
Withdraw the claws violently
With gouts of flesh

Tune in tune in
Only remember
Only sever
Only connect
To alight upon tall cold places
And leave the marshes behind

O to be a wicked youth again
Tumbling wet yet through the steamy marshes
Not yet the docile seated elder
Among those conscious of their reverenditude
Upon their stone benches
The thumb between the cheekbone and the ear

Pulverize suspend and make an emulsion
Apply liberally to the affected area
Like the translucent pigments
In a pencil-edged watercolor

Therapy is not cure
Any more than art is perfection
To ease the pain in the phantom limb
Not to regrow the discarded member

The talking donkey that I purchased at great price
Is merely a scholar under a spell

Bad years
Gone the gentle times
The comely times gone

Teach us
You whose form encompasses
All species

Teach us to tolerate
The warfare of the elements
All substance in conflict

Teach us to wield
Your weird scepter
Snouted and bifurcated

Born yourself in tearing times
Your offspring authors
Of destruction

Accustom us
To the monsters
Within

The sun is up
The sun is yellow
The yellow sun is over the house

Man, bah!

Now see what you’ve done:
For the first time ever, reduced me to reliance
Upon punctuation.

You are capable of exercising reason,
And what do you do?
–Believe in superstitious nonsense.

You are capable of exercising self-control,
And what do you do?
–Indulge the basest of the passions.

You are capable of respect,
And what do you do?
–Treat others and yourself as instruments, obstacles, or rubbish.

You are capable of courage,
And what do you do?
–Hide behind the skirts of your systems, your laws, and your masters.

You are capable of appreciation,
And you consume rotten garbage.

You are capable of creating beauty,
And you blow up the Parthenon
And defecate upon the rubble.

You defile nature,
Corrupting the air, the water, the earth.

You murder children, women, men, and beasts
For your amusement.

You boast of your achievements
And elevate jackals to the hall of heroes.

You boast of your intelligence
When you understand nothing,
Nothing
Of any importance.

Sometimes I get a word stuck in my head like boustrophedon
taht tnasaelpnU

The long-distance call came in early evening
A pleasant time for family chat
My father said I have cancer
The final syllables falling into an abyss

How to respond cried my racing thoughts
Two among the stampeding herd
Cary Grant in a screwball comedy
And I lack the skill for my life to imitate art

I lacked the courage to confront the horror
And so opted for project management
Identifying candidates for a second opinion
And venues wherein to obtain the procedure

Or did I lack the feeling to offer words of comfort
To the great fearsome wreck
And is it so that strength of feeling
Must ever yield force of language

Some time later I visited the hospital
And spent some time alone with him
He lapsed frequently into unconsciousness
Occasion for terrifying apnea

Gradually his waking intervals
Outpaced the troubled sleep
And we watched as Tom Glavine
Got himself in and out of trouble

My father lived another ten years
Though plagued with grotesque neuropathy
Plaguing my mother with a million errands
In the three-room apartment

Reader depart
You’ll find no poet in these pages
For I lack the will and the words
Adequate to the occasion

1
Philosophical music is a contradiction in terms
Though both elements are necessary for a good life

Philosophy is an aim a striving
Music is decor an ambience
Both offer healing for the already traumatized

Philosophy aims for truth
Music is that condition which all art aims for
The object of an aim
That has little to do with truth

A profound sadness
A substantial grief

Troipeo sbestitu
Thoirea

Is theft okay
Is bile

The meatcutter’s bandsaw
Most of what passes for

These are not validity claims
These are remarks prefatory to
A therapeutic regimen

These are not private concerns
Uninflected by social conditions
These are not whims

These are not instructions for use and care
Ou already know how to use
Nor tenebrous portentions

Among all else
These are predications
Of varying modality

A genetic error manifest
In impressive plumage

When somebody demands an account
You don’t reply What color

Adg bal sogn beliavo
Terzs tomorgan mrogan zer
Tmog bsal ou ropa dzu caer

The arrangement of dissonances
Problem-solving with no stakes
A game of Tetris
The elegant gleanings of orthography
The durable bars of punctuation

Truth heals by cleansing the trauma
Thalian treatment Thalesian

A general theory of decay for example
The entropic potential of stable systems
The cleavage within that makes variation possible
The necessity and indeed fruitfulness of error

Ambience heals by integrating the moods
Yesanmy golden shoe

Thoierea
Alchemical infusion
Insense

The preface must not aim for comprehensiveness
Lest it lapse into dogma
Or amounts to the same
Cliche

Reified
Obtinent
Ulradic senbl

Zair genoi Duf sofo gard devntss
Cur frowl fracoica uiebes

2
Musical philosophy on the other hand
Not unprecedented

It
Whatever it is will remain mixed
Clean beautiful not pure

Fiarstoere

The earliest watery paradigm
Arrayed in verse
Ripe for merlodification

The torment
Whatever it is
Contaminated with joy

Oppressive nostalgia
As for the pulverulent prison
Lookforit

A blue metaphor
A distinct retraction

I do apologize
Palutde

Factula balndlua als comoc
Tnedos ins ser!hep enygerm

Can one say
Sensibly and sincerely
Heard melodies are sweet
+
But those unheard
Are sweeter

Their us of curce
A muddle corse

Assuming an infinitely and consistently expanding universe
The center must geometrically speaking hold
And one could theoretically carry into silent space
The sounds within

And instead a speculation
As to the the state of the art

Doing or suffering
Neither outside nor inside
Both the active and the contemplative

Since there is after all
After all no bright line

Setting

At spreer ntergay porg
Belms froger mach wiz tamnyion
Tromenon sair/dod Ramoeni
Vagusa

As day falls gently

Alchemical infusion is a completely sensible formulation
Provided that alchemy be regarded as merest metaphor

Into night

“Areyou hearing me

As earth rolls round
The great motion
Indetectable
Though never in doubt

So music
The alchemical infusion
Of philosophy

Floaters and flashes always appear
The first a true objective phenomenon
Bits of tissue drifting and wriggling
Like nematodes in a soil infusion
Or spirochetes in the aqueous humor

Ah but the photopsia
Pure perception
Pure because uninflected
By any external stimulus
Or for that matter internal

Review the parlor trick entitled
The Transit of the Invasive Skull
First in pink inscribe upon white paper
A small solid circle resting atop short vertical lines
When the aura swims swing your glance to white ceiling

Behold there the green skull suspended
Restless insubstantial transitory
Artifact of overtaxed rods and cones
Physical memory engendered by creative violence
By generative destructive will

The great poet is herself already divided
Her command not for posterity
But for herself
One part of the self commanding another part
One self commanding another self’s self

Tell it slant
The commanding voice
From the past
From the present
The faction that retains controlling interest

You look up from the ledger and see
Numerals dance before your eyes
And as you recline upon retiring
You see numerical figures
Projected upon the backs of your intermittent eyelids
Like a slideshow in the 1950s

The drudgery of keeping current
Of accounting for the incoming facts
A sorcerer’s apprentice
Drowning in the incoming flow
Acknowledging the agency not of oneself
But of that which trends

Fear of abstraction
Fear of machines
Nostalgia for the lost hope
Defense of the fading memories
Grief for the purged enthusiasm
Grief for the past elasticity

Now you have succeeded
And all the deadbolts lock at once
And variegated seeming declines to mere being
Parse the latest directive
Never ambiguity
Only superfluity

Can a database sustain tragedy
Can market research accommodate
An erectile engorgement of wishful thinking
Hemmed in rational affirmation
Repudiate the idealized past
And the dread future lose in mere forgetting

Innovation is the blow of fate

Suddenly yes that’s it
The primal sin of modernity
The one the poet spoke of
The iron cage the scientist spoke of
It’s ennui
Not even fully domesticated in our language
So new and yet so firmly seated

A different poet spoke of
A stifled drowsy unimpassioned grief
This isn’t that
It is a kind of desire no doubt
A lack an emptiness a defect a removal a shortage
An earliest loss
The invention of a truly original sin

Life begins with already-lost
The infant clothed cleansed and fed
According to well-established principles
Comes to believe in the advent of mercy
And soon experience
Transposes this expectation
Into the key of satisfaction

The builders of the pyramids didn’t have it
Nor did the condemned in solitary confinement
No you have to have money to spend
Or patronage or a line of credit
The compulsion to buy
The consumer’s addiction
Anything to fill the hole

Knowing full well
That no muffin will indicate contrition
No image of nourishment
Even of the beggar’s fleas
Will suffice or satiate that craving
And so we seek ever more thorough
Delirium

The contrary is also true of course
And many acts deliver fulfillment
But the bars of the prison cell are permeable
Our fellow inmates
Close enough to touch
But touch them we dare not
So fresh the mouth upon that gaping wound

Euery torwd drospe ue cyord
Tedeum onse trebvit anwe doreor
En awhil dreggie a
Nroml wird
Ljou conontre enmol ec genareod
Vair gaisson t marak owft
Oe eo aignt
Muriee
Wyrd nomril fagkst bcabstrot

And admitting what he’s suppressed for a long time
That he’s been living in the grip of fear
It used to be war in a far corner of earth
Albeit brought into our living rooms as was said
But now it’s in our coastlines our forests our neighborhoods
From Santiago Teheran Hong Kong
To the bleached coral of The Great Barrier Reef
The armed police brandishing their arms
The assembled multitude at the bidding of The Leader
Chanting Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit

He had ducked and covered during the Cold War
In the shelter of the tiny desk
His fear of airplanes exposing the falseness of his hope
He had sampled the powerful psychotropics
But there must have been some problem with the dosage
His festive vacation a trip into terror
He had watched as his truck burned
He had listened when he was told he’d lost his job
Because of some defect in his character
He had gone through the windshield in a single-vehicle crash

The past is prologue some wise guy opined
And repeated insults to body brain and spirit
Had prepared him to expect catastrophe
An expectation he nourished and refused to acknowledge
Some other philosopher asserted that courage
Was to be found not in the absence of fear
But in the mastery of it
Yet another had claimed cowardice the only sin
Now he knew who he was or what
A shock of recognition and a feast of self-reproach

Because it hurts and people don’t know this
It hurts to perform the contortions required
For self-examination self-speculation
And he carries out the performance
Doubting and believing that he is thus obliged
The more tortuous in that he also believes
It wrong to examine oneself
The campaigners against cowardice also
Prosecuting a war against narcissism
Examining fear though not the cause of fear

And lacking moreover the intelligence
To grasp the decentered subject
And clinging instead to the Cartesian ghost
Even while subjecting the brain
To ever more extreme assaults
The drugs chemistry exhibitionism and excess
Not forgetting self-praise the kiss of death
World’s Most Successful Drunk Driver
Longest Duration for a Single Feedback Guitar Note
Most Egregious Act of Self-regard

And so to the cause
If one’s little life is the most important thing
Then paralyzing fear makes perfect sense
Forget that nonsense about fearing the unknown
We fear we humans what we know
We know our ill deeds our impure thoughts
We know the thick catalogue of fractional truths
We know the seductions of prejudice and superstition
We know the compulsions of greed and lust
And that Mad Captain Death fast or slow will never relent

Turn from the mirror
You don’t know how to make a lamp

Will some higher power send me
A lamp to blind this domineering mirror

What authority stands behind the command
To tell it slant
The great poet certainly
But
Are we enjoined to treat all others as children
And likewise ourselves
And does the deuteronomy end here
Or are there more narratives of shame
Exhortations to repent
And directives to be obeyed

And surely the implicit stipulation
Tell it slant to tell it right
And hence enough to say
Tell it right
And everybody knows or else should know
To renounce theft
To forswear abstraction
Avoid slackness
And above all
Seek exile from the kingdom of oneself

Poetry is not morally good
And aesthetic goodness
What is it
Certainly not adherence to rule
Renouncing forswearing avoiding and seeking
What everybody knows or thinks they know
Comparing sunsets
Ranking kittens
Anatomizing simple pleasures
Betraying the electromagnetic spectrum

My mother: I’m sick of it

Me: Sick of what

My mother: The whole thing

Mule deer and mouse deer
And savor of sage and wild fennel
Called stink weed
And cephalopods and crustaceans
And diatoms and great white oaks
And the decaying trunk of oak
Home of grubs and lichen and fungus
Red-winged blackbirds and red algae bloom
Plains of grass and broad freezing forests
Prey that graze
Prey that prey
Starfish shaped like imperial crowns of thorns
Flatfish shaped like shoes
Annelids and planaria shaped like the soles of shoes
Great birds with bill shaped like shoe
In the forest and in the museum
And skeletal coral
Bones bleached in the sun
Chimney swifts wheeling before the setting sun